Should you let your dog eat bones? Pose the question to a group of dog owners and you are sure to get a variety of answers, probably closely followed by some heated discussion.

There is no simple answer. It depends both on the dog and the type of bone. Most dogs and cats do eat bones sometimes and are no worse for the experience. Indeed since dogs' nearest wild relatives, wolves, live on small whole rodents, bones cannot always be bad.

The dog that gnaws away at a nice big raw beef marrow bone is unlikely to come to much harm, although if they are big and strong enough to crunch up and swallow the whole bone they may end up with a nasty dose of constipation.

The sort of bones that do cause problems are usually cooked which makes them harder and more brittle. Cooked chicken bones are small and sharp and sometimes cause trouble, but the bones that most often cause serious problems are cooked pork or lamb chop bones. Of those the most dangerous part is the knobbly round vertebra from the thick end of the chop.

Take what happened to Rufus, a three-year-old Staffordshire bull terrier. Her owners innocently enough gave her a chop bone to chew. They did not connect her illness with the chop bone and brought her along because she was off her food and being sick with what might have been a stomach bug. When her symptoms failed to respond to simple medication she was admitted to my hospital for more investigations. What followed turned out to be extremely challenging.

By the time she was admitted to the hospital it was clear that she could not keep any food down and had stopped passing any bowel motions. Her temperature, which had been raised, had come back down to normal, but she was getting worse.

After I had examined her, I put her under anaesthetic and took x-rays of her chest and abdomen. There in her gullet in the middle of her chest, just behind her heart, was the irregular outline of a lump of bone. Several more x-rays confirmed its position, and when I looked down with an endoscope there was a rotting chop bone totally blocking her gullet.

It would prove very difficult to get at. Opening the chest to get to the gullet is fraught with risks and horribly liable to lead to serious complications, so I chose to open the stomach and pass instruments both downwards from the mouth and upwards from the stomach to gradually dislodge the firmly-wedged bone. Eventually, after a hard struggle, I managed to slide the bone out.

Rufus had to spend several days in hospital on a drip while her gullet and stomach healed. Gradually she recovered enough to take water and then mushed-up food. She is home now and almost fully recovered but she will not be getting any more bones to eat for a long time.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.